Will Anyone Ask “Are You A Virgin” At Gay Weddings?

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If pro football players walked out onto the field yelling to the crowd “watch me play football!” the fans in attendance may question the mental health of that player. Why don’t the same fans question the mental health of media personalities who do the same thing? Columnists for newspapers like the Times Picayune tacitly say “watch me write my opinions” when they intone “if you ask me…” on a particular issue. Well, I bought your paper, turned to your page, so I AM asking you and I will most likely disagree(1), but hey, that’s what life is all about right? Even when it comes to foundational things like life, or death or say marriage, wait, scratch that, say “gay marriage”.

Why should there be disagreement over something that is as old history itself? Well, that is because the rule of Man is at hand, Gods have been told to hit the road and “don’t let the door hit ya, where Good ________ split ya”(2).

St Thomas Aquinas clarified(3) the Roman Catholic Church’s teachings on marriage in the 1270’s and in reading Aquinas I’m reminded that one of the questions that used to be asked of those soon to be married “is virginity better than marriage?” Aquinas answered that it was not writing that ‘though virginity is better than conjugal continence, a married person may be better than a virgin”.

That homosexuals and most heterosexuals aspire to marriage but leave the virginity part out is a sign of our times. Perhaps media types should ask of their gay marriage teammates “which of you is the wife and do you present yourself as a virgin?” Of course who wants to bothered with the spiritual technicalities of what marriage is being made into during this whole debacle: a quest for a government approved status that can earn you an income tax break.

So, those of us who are married may as well emulate the mentally ill media types and instruct our spouses to “watch me play marred”.

David Mendez writes of Aquinas “For example, he considers one of the first ingredients for marriage in question forty-five of the Summa when he deals with “The Marriage Consent Considered in Itself.”[19] Here he considers the past historical elements in marriage whereby women were given away as property and usually negotiated by the father[20] To this he answers that matrimony as a sacrament is a kind of “spiritual joining together” and it is also a “material joining together” insofar as it relates to the natural goods and desires they both have.[21] It follows from this that since this is a sacrament in its fullest sense then it also follows that consent is its efficient cause because, according to Aquinas, this (as a sacrament) is empowered from above.

Yet, one of his first references to marriage can be found as early as the second part of the second part of the Summa where he deals with whether virginity is more excellent than marriage. In answering his objectors he declares that virginity is more excellent because Christ himself chose a virgin as his mother. However, he does clarify that “though virginity is better than conjugal continence, a married person may be better than a virgin for two reasons. First, on the part of chastity itself; if to wit, the married person is more prepared in mind to observe virginity, if it should be expedient, than the one who is actually a virgin.”[22] Here he quotes Augustine in mentioning that reason and the “Holy Writ” say that marriage is not sinful because it is not that of being a virgin or widowed.”